SwingDJs

Scenario - You are a collector and you have a mammoth collection of stuff on an iPod, maybe more than one iPod.

Then you get sick, retire or die or just need cash. Does your iPod filled with great stuff have any value as a resellable item? Should you let your wife know to not just put it in a corner?

Has such an iPod ever been sold?

Just curious.

I think any music on the iPod would add little if any value to it unless by some chance it happened to contain the only electronic copy of some music, where all other copies had been lost. Copyright law regarding music on an second-hand iPod is also a grey area as far as I know. Have you got an iPod?

Haydn wrote:I think any music on the iPod would add little if any value to it unless by some chance it happened to contain the only electronic copy of some music, where all other copies had been lost. Copyright law regarding music on an second-hand iPod is also a grey area as far as I know. Have you got an iPod?

No iPod here.

I was just thinking of the resale ability of records and CDs and I wonder if this new media had that benefit.

Wouldn't it be a good deal to buy another collector's iPod instead of paying and gathering all the music yourself which would take years?

And, yes, a one-off performance would likely increase the value.

Eyeball wrote: I was just thinking of the resale ability of records and CDs and I wonder if this new media had that benefit.

Wouldn't it be a good deal to buy another collector's iPod instead of paying and gathering all the music yourself which would take years?

The data has value (more specifically the license to use said data... but who are we kidding here), however your suggested means of transferring said data does not. Pulling music off an iPod is a pain in the ass, and you certainly wouldn't want to just keep it on the thing because they are prone to break, and you've essentially locked down all that music to one device. Said person looking to sell a large number of music files at once would be better off putting them on a cheap hard drive, or make arrangements with the buyer to make a direct file transfer.

That's fascinating b/c I was under the impression that many collectors had stored all their music on an iPod and didn't necessarily have it backed up on a hard drive somewhere.

See - that was it. I didn't think of retrieving music from someone's iPod. I thought of selling the iPod itself to another collector as if it were a record collection.

So the iPod is really more of a convenient place to keep a lot of music on hand or to have it ready for an event, but not as the sole storage facility for your music files. So no serious collector would keep all his music on an iPod alone and therefor no one would think of selling it as such.

Is that it?

Eyeball wrote:That's fascinating b/c I was under the impression that many collectors had stored all their music on an iPod and didn't necessarily have it backed up on a hard drive somewhere.

I consider the music on my iPod a backup. One of many.

Logistical issues aside (you need to have it on a computer first to put it on the iPod), it would take an .... unusual .... mentality to depend upon a small easily lost, easily stolen, and entirely breakable device as the sole storage device for a valuable music collection.

I didn't realize that iPods were that fragile and prone to doom. Until I looked at an image of an iPod, I had not knowingly ever seen one until yesterday. In fact, for some damn reason, whenever I heard the word "iPod", I pictured a Rubic's Cube in my mind's eye. I don't know why, but I did, like some colorful Borg space ship holding near endless quantities of music in each smaller cube.

Thx for the eye-opener!

Just think of the iPod as the record player, and the music files as the records.

Mr Awesomer wrote:Just think of the iPod as the record player, and the music files as the records.

Thx. Works for me.

Now I can stop bashing myself for not having my stuff on an iPod since the iPod is merely a convenience and not a secure, permanent method of storage.